2
Lily
Oh,shit. I should have left my romance novels at home. But when considering the rest of my life, I only wanted to read Wuthering Heights or Odyssey so many times. The classics were, well, classic, and I’d brought along hundreds, if not thousands of dollars’ worth of books, but I knew I would want something fun to read. Sexy. Stories that made me happy when I turned the last page.
The rest of my life was a long damn time.
And now Darius was looking at me like he was a hungry lion and I was dinner.
“Lily?” He walked toward me, pulled me to my feet with gentle hands until I faced him. I wanted to look away, but the slightest touch of his fingers on my cheek and I was frozen in place.
“Darius.” I was drowning in his eyes. Drowning. My heart pounded, my legs were shaking.
“I asked you a question, Titan.”
Titan? Was I a Titan? One of the biggest, baddest tech warriors in the Starfighter program? Six meters of walking, talking, destruction? Truly?
Perhaps I was all those things in a game…no, not a game, a training program I’d believed was nothing more than a video game back on Earth, Starfighter Training Academy. Sitting in my living room behind a controller, I was unhinged. Fearless. But in the flesh? Real tough I was turning out to be. A real lady, too. Ladies did not want the things I imagined Darius doing to me. And what now? How could I tell him I wanted to try everything I’d read in my beast books, but I’d never been with anyone before.
“I should finish unpacking,” I whispered, staring at his lips. Why couldn’t I just say yes? Why? Need was a living, burning beast within, but I choked on the word.
I had been raised to be respectful and quiet. Demure. A lady looked after the needs of others before herself. My mother had taught me to never let my guard down with a man. Never trust. “Use every asset at your disposal to get what you want,” she’d once said to me, “but don’t ever give a man your heart.”
I’d watched my father’s stoic indifference break my mother into a thousand tiny pieces. I’d watched her try to drink herself into not caring. But she loved him anyway. Still did, for all I knew. They usually sent an email with photos from a new exotic locale every few months, my father busy with “work” and my mother amusing herself with “lessons” at the Country Club or the latest resort. I’d learned early on this was my mother’s prim and proper code for fucking whatever they could, wherever they could. My mother would never be so crass as to say the word fuck, but that’s what she meant. It had almost become a game to them. A competition.
I didn’t want any part of it, and so I had steered clear of men. In all honesty, foraging around for a penis to take my virginity hadn’t seemed worth the effort when a discreet, electronic toy gave me perfectly acceptable orgasms with none of the drama. After one disastrous dating montage in college, I had learned to ignore men. All men, except digital versions who couldn’t break my heart.
If I didn’t want to get involved with men then standing here in front of the live version of the man I had literally built from the ground up in the game, every detail of my partner chosen from the dark, sexy voice to his hotter than hell body and cocky, dominant personality was all kinds of wrong. Big mistake. Darius of was a real, flesh and blood Velerion who had spent hours filling out questionnaires and surveys in order to create the game version of himself, all in the hopes of being selected by a Starfighter. Selected by someone like me. My perfect partner, and he had heartbreak written all over him in bold, capital letters. Crazy, but I’d fallen for him long before I knew he was real. If I let him touch me the way his eyes said he wanted to, there would be no going back.
Not that my body was listening to a hint of common sense. My nipples hardened into aching pebbles. My core was tight and pulsing and so very empty. I wanted him to pound into me like a beast.
“Lily, talk to me.”
The air left my body in a whoosh, and I licked suddenly dry lips, my tongue brushing the tip of his finger. He stared, taking the opportunity to slowly stroke my damp bottom lip with his thumb. I lifted my hand to his chest and settled it above his heart. “I don’t want to talk.”
His turn to stop breathing.
My words were honest. The absolute truth. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to lay my soul bare or ask him for anything. I sure as hell didn’t want to tell him the only knob I’d ever handled had been battery powered. Playing by the rules had done nothing but earned me a lonely, dead-end job at a library so old it smelled like a morgue for books. Most days I was the youngest person in the building by an average of two decades. I loved books, loved the classics, but I was tired of reading about adventures and never having one of my own.
Darius, tall, dark, sexy Darius was standing in front of me looking at me like he wanted to rip my clothes off. I was on another planet. Earth Lily was dead now. I didn’t have to behave like her another moment.
Starfighter Lily Wilson could be the Titan Darius had named me. I could be brave and sexy and wild. Powerful. Fearless. Important. Adored.
Could I not?
If I were so brave and sexy and wild, why did my heart threaten to pound its way out from behind my rib cage? Why did I feel like I was about to faint? My body drifted and swayed like whispers and smoke, the only thing anchoring me to reality the heat of Darius’s thumb on my lip.
I watched as he lowered his head slowly, his gaze moving at the last moment from my eyes to my lips. So, so close. The heat of his breath was like fire in my throat as I soaked him in. His scent. His desire.
Nothing existed but us. Time stopped. We drifted toward one another.
Contact.
His lips were firm. Hot. Demanding.
That was the end of me. I lost my bloody mind.
“Off. Off. Off.” I tugged at his clothing, the soft black clothing he’d changed into when we’d been shown to our new quarters. “Take them off. Now.”